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Eight Thoughts from the Silk Road

I just published my thoughts from visiting Xi'an, China...

This essay started as an attempt to answer questions about my cultural heritage, yet my relationship with being Chinese continually changes. To definitively codify my identity as "Chinese American" with predetermined sets of cultural characteristics is disingenuous. At times I feel like a scholar, at other times a punk. I am as varied as the musicians I listen to or the authors I read.

With this in mind, I write an essay that attempts to escape the confines of false definitions about being Chinese to enter the ever-expanding space of continued dialogue. Together, we can begin to grasp, if not define, heritage and identity through our commonalities and differences.

This essay jump from place to place. Conclusions contradict. Personal ruminations mix with poems, anecdotes, and asides. Ideas truncate mid-sentence defying completeness. In short, this essay is a mess, at times distasteful, at times elegant, sometimes befuddling, but hopefully clear as a tactic to encapsulate the complexity I feel surrounding my Chinese heritage.